A Whisper Upon the Cold
by Cobray
Summary: Standing on top of a monument to a painful past, Squall and Rinoa think about an uncertain future. One question lies between them. A short vignette.


She was beautiful.

She stares upwards with pale blue eyes, her hair spread behind her as she reaches a single hand towards the surface. Long white hair streams behind her like a scarf caught in the wind, twisting and waving in an imaginary breeze. She's wearing an old Esthar dress, all pale colours and geometric patterns, that hugs her figure to the waist and then fans out like a blooming flower. With her hand reached out towards mine she looks like a ballet dancer poised straight and true, a half-second away from falling into the dance. She's beautiful. I kneel down and reach out myself, my own hand mirroring hers.

The cold ice stops my palm, only inches from hers.

"Squall?"

I get up again as I feel Rinoa walk over and stand beside me. Like crossing a threshold the cold air is driven away as she approaches. I feel warmer just being near her. "One more here."

She doesn't say anything this time. She just looks over her shoulder at the exhumation team and waves them over before turning back. Side by side, we stand there on the top of the glacier and look down at the dead woman in the ice.

"What a shame."

No crying this time, or expressions of shock from either of us. They're all gone and been replaced by resignation and depression that arrived after the fifth gigantic slab of ice and salt, and simply hasn't left. When we leave the northern glacier to camp for the night it comes with us, and more of it is waiting when we arrive again in the morning. Only one of us has any capacity for surprise anymore.

"Ah _shit._" Laguna kicks at the ice with his boots, sending a stray pebble skittering away across the deep blue surface. The light from the midday sun falling onto the ice sends brilliant deep blues and purples back up from the seemingly endless depths. It seems obscene that something so beautiful could hide something so ugly.

I turned to Rinoa, still staring down at the figure trapped in the ice. "Do you want to go?" I ask, for the fifth time since we started the long contract.

"No," my Sorceress, my wife, my everything, whispers back at me. "I have to know."

Laguna is talking on the radio, calling over the heavy machinery that will cut down through the glacier, searching and carving until can lift the woman out of the glacier in her own little ice-cube, to be taken home and investigated and finally given a proper burial. Then they would look underneath her, and even though we all hope this will be the end of it, we know it won't be. There are always more. At first we thought they were alone in their frozen graves, lost souls caught up in some freak flash-freeze or old flood, moved here by the slow movement of the ice. Esthar scientists had dug and drilled and scanned and found them. Then they had looked beneath them, deeper into the ice, and the nightmare had begun.

"Is this me?" Rinoa whispers, staring down with wide eyes. I know she isn't comparing herself to the unnamed victim, but to the spectre that haunts her, and haunts every corpse that we pull from the ice. It sits over us all like a fog, reminding us of its presence with every breath we take.

I pulled her close and put my arms around her, forcing myself into whatever horrible thoughts she's dreaming. Her hair presses against me and I can smell our home there; pine-needles and honeycomb. "Never."

She pushes back. "What if…"

"Not so long as I'm alive."

A third figure joins us at the strange grave, and stands there speechless for a moment. Even though he's silent though I can feel the fury radiating from him.

"You bitch. You fucking bitch."

My father changes when he talks about Adel.

I knew him before I ever met him, taken into his past by the desperate hopes of my adopted sister. He'd been young and impulsive, more than a little clumsy, and far too honest for his own good. Later when I had met him in the present – and for years afterwards – the only side of Laguna Loire I ever saw was the genial joker, the smiling face, the slightly goofy-looking figure that sat behind a big white desk and seemed to do…not much at all, really. I'd asked myself why the most advanced nation on the planet, a nation so far ahead of everyone else that they were in _space_ while the rest of us were barely in the air, had elected as their president an ex-soldier from a nation they had been at war with less than a decade ago.

When the dust had finally settled after the Magic War, and we had all went on to live our lives, Laguna had called us up. He had asked that since the present was finally fixed and the future looked like it could take care of itself, could we help him put some old ghosts of the past to rest. So Rinoa and I had made the journey from Timber to the city. Selphie and Irvine had come down from the in-construction – and thanks to her deal the soon-to-be-constructed-much-faster New Trabia City. Even Zell had wandered up from whatever he was doing in Centra. Only Siren had politely refused, keeping her silent mourning vigil over the orchards she was teasing to life in Esthar's deserts, in the bones of the Garden we had left there.

So we had our reunion party, and then the next day we had opened the old books and records to track down those who had gone missing during Adel's reign. We had found ghosts. Endless ghosts.

Laguna's benign and cheerful mask fell away when he saw it, and did so every time we found a new list of names or markers for mass-graves. When that happened I could see past the steadily-greying and smiling President Loire to the fury and steel of the soldier he had been before, when he had led a revolution against a mad tyrant. After the Second Sorceress War against Ultimecia, when half the world had been crying out for Galbadian blood, it had been Laguna that extended a hand of friendship. After the Magic War that had stripped the earth bare of supernatural power it had been him that had set out to forge the world into something more than single nations vying for power. Sometimes it seemed Laguna Loire had enough love and forgiveness in him for the whole world. But there was one small black spot in his heart that he kept for a single person. For as long as he lived he would despise even the memory of Adel. When we had followed the paper-trail to the first glacier and realised we were standing top of a mass grave, I finally had my answer: Esthar loved Laguna, because he had delivered them from a slow and creeping hell.

"Who were they?" I ask quietly, as the machines beside us finish their work and the thin rectangle of ice containing the woman, hand still reaching towards the sky for help that never came, is finally free of her icy tomb. There's already a space made in the truck – one of many, now – that will take her back across the glacier, towards her old home and final resting place in the city.

"No clue," Laguna replies. "From the clothes she was a civilian, so the rest probably will be. Most likely a political purge."

"Why here?" Rinoa asks beside me.

"Who knows?" Laguna says. "Maybe she wanted to keep them hidden, out of the graveyards in case they had relatives in the army. Maybe it was some kind of ironic punishment. Maybe she had gotten bored of just having them shot and buried." He reaches into his winter-jacket and comes back out with a lighter, something I haven't seen him do in years. "Goddamnit. Goddamnit."

Rinoa reaches a hand out to his shoulder and just for a moment he flinches, as if she's the dead woman come back and trying to drag him away with her. Then the moment passes and the hand lies on his shoulder. "Go home," she tells her father-in-law gently. I know she can feel every bit of the pain he feels.

"I can't," The President of Esthar says. "I have to see." To witness, he meant.

"You've seen enough," she replies. "Let us."

He puts his hands over his eyes and grits his teeth. When he speaks next it's barely above a whisper. "I should have been here." I never knew it before this moment, but it's a horrible thing to watch your father cry. "Years wasted screwing around in Galbadia and Winhill. I should have come earlier."

"But you came in the end, and you found them and now you're taking them home. They'd thank you for that if they could," Rinoa tells her father-in-law. She motions with a free hand and like magic Kiros is there.

"Come on old man," the ex-Galbadian soldier tells his ex-sergeant, slapping him on the back like they're both twenty years old again. As inseparable in politics as they were in war, Kiros Seagill has always been there for my dad when he needed him. "You need to come with me while I get a goddamn drink and run the country for you."

That gets a smile out of him, the first one I've seen in days. "Fine. If only to stop a drunken Galbadian from making it any worse."

I watch as they walk off. The great digging-stroke-exhuming machine is spinning beside us, an unholy howling as it cuts through the glacier to the dark shapes buried deeper within, and I take Rinoa's arms in my own and walk us away, towards the edge of the massive hundreds-feet-high slab of ice and salt.

_Talk to me,_ I think and don't say. For long minutes both of us stare out across Esthar's massive salt plains, towards the centre of the continent. Even at this distance the city is a coloured haze that reaches up from the flat horizon, skyscrapers piercing the sky with whites and blues and reds. Looking at that jewel of life surrounded by emptiness, she finally speaks.

"She scares me," Rinoa says, looking out over the vista.

"Adel's been dead for years." More than dead; blasted across time and into nothing, her power absorbed and dissipated into Rinoa's own.

"She scares me because I don't know who she was," she says.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

Rinoa holds a hand out. A gold ring glitters on her finger, the twin to mine. "Maybe before she ever got my power she was evil, before she ever became a Sorceress. Maybe she grew up with a Sorceress mother who taught her that it was fine to kill people because she was strong and they were weak."

"Rin…"

"But what if there was a little girl once called Adel who wasn't any of that? What if she loved her parents and played with other little girls and had dreams about growing up like everyone else?"

"Rin, you shouldn't…"

"What if the real Adel died long before Laguna ever met her, and the person he met was really just…Sorceress?"

I know this argument. I've heard it a dozen times before now, from the fools and the angry and above all from the scared. All they know is that one Sorceress controlled Esthar through fear and another came within a hair's breadth of controlling Galbadia. We kept Ultimecia out of the public as best we could, but of course some things slipped through the cracks and out into the papers, the gossips and whispers. A story about a nebulous power that controlled both of them and now rested inside the body of a third. Thank God the real story isn't known, I don't know what would happen. Somehow now they think the Sorceress power is some kind of sentient death-god that infests women and makes them evil. Better take no chances, kill the Sorceress just in case, right? They make the argument to me as if just because I've fought Sorceresses I'm somehow more prone to believing in it, even though it's complete garbage. Adel and Ultimecia were corrupt before the power ever touched them, not corrupt _because_ of it. I say all of this, and in return I get a smile so sad it breaks my heart.

"How do you know?"

I grab her and turn her so that her eyes are looking directly into mine. For a moment the pale face of the dead woman – killed by a mad Sorceress – flashes across my sight. Then it's gone and the only person in front of me is Rinoa Leonhart. "Because I know," I say. "Because I love you and I _know_."

We look out from the top of the glacier, pressed against each other to keep out the wind that swept in from the sea. Staring inland for a second it seemed like the shining city of Esthar on the horizon was some impossible glass sculpture, suspended on a flat sea of marble. Standing there looking at the jewel of the world it was easy to forget the reason that we were here. Then I heard the whir of the ice-cutting machinery behind us, and I could remember all too clearly. Suddenly it seemed…wrong…somehow, to be alive and happy and loved while entombed below us were hundreds of the dead whose only crime had been to be borne when the jewel of Esthar had been fractured and warped, rather than pristine and whole. I could imagine them down there, staring up at us and hating us for our happiness.

_Why not us, Sorceress? Why you and not us? Why do you get a husband and friends who love you and a life to live, and we get a cold hole in the earth?_

Suddenly I wanted to be gone. Back to Balamb, or Timber. Anywhere except this giant frozen monument to death. "Let's go home Rin. Rin?"

She wasn't looking at me, instead down at the massive hole in the ice where Adel's victims had rested, lost, until today. "And what if you're wrong?"

"I'm not," I say. She turns to look at me and I know from the look in her eyes that isn't going to be good enough. _And even if you did it wouldn't matter to me,_ I almost say. The scary thing was, I don't think it would. I remember the person I was before I met Rinoa. Sometimes at night I wake up and see her sleeping next to me, and I think back to him; a childish brat too alone and isolated to even realise what he was missing out on, who for some reason lucked into a group of friends better than anything he deserved. Rinoa had reached through that boy's shell and somehow brought me out of there and into the light. Sometimes I woke up at nights and wondered what would have happened if I had never met her, if it had been Seifer she had met instead of me. Maybe I'd still be that boy. The thought was terrifying.

_I would go with you anywhere._

"Even if I turned into someone like that?" she gestured back at the yawning hole in the ice. "Even if the world hated me?"

I stood next to her so close that we were touching. I could feel her heart beating against mine, warm and regular. Against the cold of the ice around us, I could have sworn I could feel the heat coming from it, as warm as the sun. "No matter what you do I'll love you Rinoa. I'd still be your Knight. Wherever you went I'd go there with you."

She touched the hilt of my gunblade, a weapon I hadn't used in years. It was mainly ceremonial now, ever since the Magic War ended. It was one of the only things I'd kept with me since SeeD had been dissolved. "And if I wanted _this?_" she asked. "If I turned to you one day and said; Squall, let's rule the world and screw everyone who wants to stop me?"

The sun was falling below the horizon, casting the last of its light across the glacier we stood on. For a moment as the final rays shone through the slab and lit us from around and below, the yellows and oranges of sunset twisted by the ice into deep purples and greens, it looked like the ground we stood on was burning with unnatural fire. I looked into Rinoa's eyes and saw it there too, glinting in the depths of her pupils.

"I'd walk with you as far as I could go," I replied softly, "and then I'd follow you to wherever Sorceresses go when they pass on." That was as close as I could get to saying it, and Rinoa knew it. She smiled as the sun finally set and the light around us was extinguished. The sunlight, at least.

For a moment I thought sky must have cleared to let the moon shine down on us, because all around me I could see faint white light. Then I looked up and saw the clouds were still flowing across the Estharian plains, and realised that the light was coming from my wife. The light flowed around and behind her, white wings that moved and twisted around us until we stood together and alone inside a white cage of feathers and magic.

"Good enough. I love you, Squall Leonheart."

"I love you, Rinoa Heartilly."

The night winds flowed around us as we moved away from the darkness of the ice, back towards the cars that would take us to the refuge and light of the city. Her wings wrapped around us both, keeping out the prying cold and engulfing us both in warmth and light. We held hands and walked away together as the wind blew through the glacier. For a second as Rinoa's power flowed across the dark expanse I imagined I could feel the ones still down there yet to be found. Victims of the last Sorceress to walk across these plains, now given light and some small warmth by another. My mouth moved without thinking as I whispered something down at them, witnessing a peaceful future full of life and hope, as Laguna had looked down witnessing a painful past finally dug up and laid to rest. Maybe they hated us for being alive and happy while they were dead, but maybe they would accept that there would never be any more like them again.

_Forgive us._

"Let's go home," she said.

The wind blew around us, scattering Rinoa's feathers across the ice before us, illuminating the small patches of grass and flowers that sprung up from the hard surface. Even in the heart of death, life clung on.

In spite of everything.

_End_

* * *

Heya. Wow I'm tired.

Originally meant for Ashbear's little collection/storytime late last year and lost to a lazy reformat. I was wondering whether it was still in my head and so why not, it'll be a break in my current roadblock in my other story. Now here it is, confused tenses and all, finished and edited at like 10pm. It's set at some indeterminate point in the _Shadow and Light_ timeline, which I may re-visit after A&O is done. You should check that out if you liked this.

Fun fact; it took me twenty minutes to think up a title after I finished the story. I'm still not sure I'm happy with it.

Goodnight!

-Cobray


End file.
